RIM Stops Cross Platform BBM Support Development

Research In Motion’s (RIM) popular messaging app, BlackBerry Messenger (BBM), which RIM was supposed to bring to other platforms including Android, iOS, and Windows Phone has now canned its further development.

RIM has recently lost its market dominance in the smartphone market. However, its messaging app, BBM, is still popular and remains one of the reason for customers opting for BlackBerry devices. The project which was unofficially called “SMS 2.0″ within the company, has left few of the RIM’s executives worried that licensing BBM to competitors would further diminish any incentive to buy a BlackBerry.

RIM is expected to stop any further development on SMS 2.0 project and instead divert all of its attention to further development of BlackBerry OS 10. The BlackBerry OS 10 is expected to launch sometime next year.

BlackBerry’s BBM competes against, Independent messaging app — WhatsApp which is a cross platform messaging app and is available on all mobile smartphone platforms including Android, iOS, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and Symbian. Apart from that, Apple also has its own messaging app — iMessage.